'Alegria' still a high point in Cirque du Soleil creativity By Chad Jones, STAFF WRITER

YOU walk out of the blue-and-yellow-striped "grand chapiteau" tent, your head bursting with amazing images from "Alegria," and you think, "Oh, yeah. This is why I fell in love with Cirque du Soleil."

Something is special about "Alegria." That was true when it opened here nine years ago, and it was just as evident Thursday night when the show returned to the parking lot of Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco.

Most people cannot juggle their silverware, let alone twirl, toss and catch flaming knives overhead and between their legs without ever scorching a hair.

But then Karl Sanft isn't like the rest of us, nor are the rest of his acrobatic kin in Cirque du Soleil's Alegría, another surreal spectacle from the famed French circus, which opens today in Miami's Bicentennial Park.

Alegría, which means jubilation in Spanish, is the tale of a street mime who has lost his will to live and decides to fling himself before an oncoming train.

You don't know Cirque. You may have seen the occasional show on DVD or the reality TV series Cirque du Soleil: The Fire Within on Bravo. You might even have seen one of the French-Canadian circus troupe's touring performances of Quidam or Dralion or one of their permanent shows in Las Vegas, Mystère or "O".

But even if similar elements trickle throughout all these incarnations of Cirque du Soleil, you can never really know a Cirque performance until it unfolds live before your eyes.

Oh, my! What's a family to do? Right here in downtown Miami the choice you never thought you'd have to make is staring at you from across Biscayne Boulevard.

The one, the only, Greatest Show on Earth, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, is playing at AmericanAirlines Arena, right next door to the only remaining authentic Big Top, Cirque du Soleil's blue-and-yellow tent in Bicentennial Park.

CIRCUS BERSERKUS IS HERE TO IMMERSE US Wendell Brock for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

WHEN CIRQUE DU SOLEIL first took Atlanta in 1991, there was speculation about where these flamboyant circus performers came from. Was this some magical lost tribe from Middle Earth? Travelers from a distant galaxy? Was it possible that ordinary mortals could fly so high on a trapeze or contort their bodies into such otherworldy shapes? Was there nothing these ridiculously attired buffoons wouldn't do for a laugh?

In Atlanta, Cirque du Soleil comes and goes, and sometimes the same show loops back again. Such is the case with the Montreal-based troupe's "Alegría," which first played here in 1995 and re-emerged this week in the blue-and-yellow grand chapiteau (big top) near Cumberland Galleria.

Nothing wrong with that — because, thankfully, "Alegría" survives from that '90s golden age when Cirque felt like the glitziest thing to emerge from the French-speaking culture since the Moulin Rouge, if not the court of Louis XIV.

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